Third Sunday of Advent (Year A) 14th December 2025
- Fr Doug
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Today’s Gospel is about St. John the Baptist.
Jesus said: “of all children born of a woman, greater than John the Baptist has never been seen.” The question begs: What about Our Lord?
He was born of a woman, surely, he is greater than John the Baptist?
Also, what about our Blessed Mother?
She was born of a woman, surely, she is greater than John the Baptist?
Our Lord clarifies His statement by immediately saying:
“Yet, the least is the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he (John) is.”
Although Our Lord and Our Mother lived in this Kingdom on earth they were not of this Kingdom, they were of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Therefore St John, at the time Out Lord made that statement, was the greatest born of this Kingdom.
When our Blessed Mother appeared to our St Bernadette in 1858,
She called herself “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
The title “I Am” can only be said by God.
On Mt Sinai, God told Moses that his name is “I Am Who Am.”
On a number of occasions Jesus called Himself “I Am.”
For example, “Before Abraham existed I Am.” (John 8:58)
And, on that occasion, because Jesus claimed He was God, the Jews tried to stone Him to death, for the crime of blasphemy.
Our Mother could call herself “I am” because she is full of God,
full of the Holy Spirt, full of Jesus.
Our Mother is one heart with God. Also, one will and one mind.
Whatever she says is what Jesus would also say.
This is God’s plan for each one of us.
To be full of the Holy Spirit. To be One heart, mind and will with God.
God wants to work in and through us as powerfully as He did in His Son, Jesus.
As we say no to our will and yes to God’s Will; we give permission, so to speak, for God alone, and not ourselves, to reign in us.
Our Lord said to Venerable Conchita de Arminda, a mother of 9 children, in Mexico, in 1906:
“I want to incarnate Myself mystically in your heart… the grace of living and growing in your soul, never to leave it, to possess you and be possessed by you as one and the same substance… it is the grace of graces.
St John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church, whose feast day is 14th December, wrote:
“The entire matter of reaching union with God consists in purging the will of its appetites and emotions so that from a human and lowly will it may be changed into the divine will; made identical with the will of God.”
This anointing of the Holy Spirit has been given many terms.
Our Lord, when he gave this gift to Ven. Conchita called it, “Mystical Incarnation”.
The word incarnation means to be “made into flesh.”
At the incarnation, Our Divine Lord was made flesh or became a human.
St John Paul II recognised this Grace and called it a “New and Divine Holiness”.
He wrote:
“God Himself had provided to bring about that “new and divine holiness” in which the Holy Spirit wishes to enrich the church at the dawn of the third millennium in order to make Christ the heart of the world.”
In other words, Christ’s plan is to be the heart of all creation and all creatures.
Our Mother described herself (to Luisa Piccarreta in the 1920’s):
“I have my heaven within Me, and I was inseparable from my Creator. As the Divine Will, or the Divine Life, was in Me, I felt the rights of daughter, of being with the Divine Persons, of participating in all joys and happiness, riches and sanctity which Thy possess, for as much as I could partake of them, filling Me so much as not to be able to contain more.”
Our Lord’s plan is to restore each of us to the state of the saints in heaven.
The saints in heaven live in God and God lives in them.
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